Quick article writing tips.

The following are just a couple of tricks I use that make content creation easier for me and hopefully they will help you out too.

Quick article writing tip #1

I am not the world’s greatest writer. Usually I have to do a couple of edits to my articles to make them coherent so I need all the help I can get. It’s one thing to read the content to yourself when editing, but I find it much easier when I’m having it read to me by someone else. I’m not suggesting you have someone read all the content you write before you publish it, but definitely have your computer do it.

This is a quick method to ensure the content you write for your blog makes sense. You will need a text to speech program that will read the text you cut and paste into the program. These can be found for free or can be purchased. Even windows vista has one included, which I never figured out how to use. I have only ever used free programs and I find they do the job well. Currently, I use SpheNet’s free TTS reader. It only comes with one voice (though the full version comes with others) and it can seem clumsy when using it at times, but I haven’t needed to find a better program.

Give this method a try. It can make an average article good and a good article great. It can help you structure the content and cut your editing time in half.

Quick article writing tip #2.

Thinking up topics for content and posts can be tough for some people. Thinking up new subjects day in day out can seem like an impossible task, but funnily enough it is tougher when first beginning a blog rather than when you have been running it for a while. I find it much easier to think of a whole bunch of topics at once rather than thinking up a single one and writing an article for it. You may be surprised to learn how many topics you can think of by feeding off other ideas. It’s called mind mapping and it can kick start your creative juices when thinking up topics.

For those not familiar with mind mapping, it begins with a main topic (for example, fishing) that branches of with sub-topics that relate to the main (i.e. fishing rod, bait, lures, locations etc). You may then have sub-topics (or sub-sub-topics) under the sub-topics (so for ‘bait’ you may have worms, shrimp, fish etc) and so on.

All these can have an article written for each. Some topics will be better than others but it is a great way to think of ideas and to keep track of everything you’ve written about.

Even better news is that there are some great Mindmapping programs out there that you can use rather than using a pen and paper. There are a fair few programs out there but I use MindMapper professional 2008 from SimTech systems. It’ simple to use and has a great layout, but it does cost a fair bit of money. There are probably other free ones to use, just be wary of programs that claim to be free but only give you a trial version.

This method can be a great way to build content for a blog, whether it is a series of articles or laying out an entire website. It will keep everything nice and neat as you can simply put a line through a topic you’ve already covered but will still be visible if you want to go more in-depth on the subject.